1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improvements in monitoring and managing agents and telephone call activity in telephone call centers. More particularly, the present invention relates to improved graphical user interfaces for monitoring and displaying the status of telephone call center agents.
2. Background of Related Art
Telephone call centers (or call centers) are networked groups of telephone operators or xe2x80x9cagentsxe2x80x9d that provide customer service for telephone callers. Call centers can be in many different forms, from large Operator Service Systems (OSSs) under the control of telephone companies to smaller private ones such as corporate customer service centers and telemarketing groups.
An important function of a call center is to provide efficient service to all customers, including timely and satisfactory handling of all received calls. Prior art automatic call distribution (ACD) systems are software hardware hybrids for helping to efficiently switch incoming telephone calls to suitable and available operators. Notwithstanding the use of an ACD system, a call center has one or more human managers monitoring all or a designated portion of the calls received and handled by it.
Call center agents are often grouped according to xe2x80x9csplits.xe2x80x9d A split can be a type of service provided during a telephone call or a type of skill possessed by an agent. For example, one split might handle credit card orders, another might handle customer complaints, and yet another split might handle technical support. A split manager monitors the calls received by a split and either assigns calls or overrides the ACD system when thought necessary. In addition to assigning calls or overriding the ACD, the manager often adjusts the parameters of the ACD to influence the ACD behavior. For example, the manager could assign some back-up agents to work in a busy ACD system.
To better understand the performance of a group of agents or the performance of an individual agent it is desirable to monitor agent statuses. Agents can be placed in one of the following categories, for example, according to their activity status: xe2x80x9cavailablexe2x80x9d (to receive a call), xe2x80x9cringingxe2x80x9d (i.e., a ringing call is waiting be picked up by the agent), xe2x80x9cafter-call workxe2x80x9d (ACW), xe2x80x9cauxiliary workxe2x80x9d (AUX); and xe2x80x9cotherxe2x80x9d (a catchall for agent statuses that do not fit into the previous ones).
It is desirable for a manager to not only know the overall status of different categories (e.g., ACW, AUX, etc.) being monitored, but also to know which agents are in the categories of interest. In prior art systems, a manager may have the ability to generate a summary view summarizing the status of a group of agents. However, detailed information on particular agents must be gleaned from a separately generated list (not linked to the summary view) of all of the agents of the group.
While the summary view might indicate aberrations, eccentricities and abnormalities of the various status categories, the manager must painstakingly scroll through the detailed list to attempt to ascertain which agent or agents have statuses contributing to the abnormalities. This is an extremely inefficient way to view agent statuses. Further, the prior art provides no convenient way to quickly find information about a sub-group of agents who have been in selected status categories of interest during a temporal window of interest.
Thus, what is lacking but sorely needed in prior art call center monitoring systems is the ability to use the summary view of all agents being monitored as a guideline, and when necessary, leverage the summary view to interactively define a detailed view which is linked to the summary view and shows detailed information of individual agents who have been defined categories between a chosen minimum and maximum time period.
In view of the above-identified problems and limitations of the prior art, the present invention provides a method of displaying telephone call center agent status information via a graphical user interface, the method at least including the steps of:
providing a graphical summary view of agent status information summarizing the status of a set of telephone agents being monitored by a user according to a plurality of predefined agent status categories;
in response to user input, generating a highlighted area on the summary agent status view at least including the status categories and a temporal window of interest to the user;
based upon the highlighted area, automatically generating a graphical detailed view linked to the summary view, the detailed view having a graphical representation of each agent currently in the highlighted categories and temporal windows chosen by the user.
The present invention also provides a system for displaying telephone call center agent status information via a graphical user interface, the system at least including:
a summary view generator for generating a graphical summary view of agent status information summarizing the status of a set of telephone agents being monitored by a user according to a plurality of predefined agent status categories;
a highlight area generator coupled to the summary view generator and under the control of the user, adapted to generate a highlighted area on the summary agent status view at least including the status categories and a temporal window of interest to the user;
a detailed view generator coupled to the summary view generator and the highlight area generator, adapted to automatically generate a graphical detailed view linked to the summary view, the detailed view having a graphical representation of each agent currently in the highlighted categories and temporal windows chosen by the user.